Lew’s first company, Wily Technology, was a classic garage-based tech startup (actually started in his living room in Santa Cruz) that grew from one person to 300+ people before being acquired by CA in 2006 for $375M. (Full disclosure: I worked for Wily as director of strategy from 2003 through the exit.)

After a year with CA and some time off to reflect, Lew started again, solving a similar business problem, but with a mission to hack out the massive cost of sales associated with most enterprise software. Lew points his team to the craftsmanship of the iPhone, and the friction-free design of Facebook and Twitter as models for New Relic’s enterprise offering, and in fact his lead investor is Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital who also led a huge round for Twitter in 2009.

New Relic is now 2 years old and has over 4,200 customers*. Lew tells us that this approach eliminates as much as 80% of the delivery costs, and takes months out of the innovation cycle. Is the model sustainable? What kind of exits are available to SaaS-based enterprise software companies? What does this model mean to the future of enterprise software?

Check out Lew’s answers in this episode of Take 5: our conversation on leadership, technology, and product management.

* Errata: The audio uses the number of 40,000 websites; this was my error. Lew wrote me to clear this up: “We collect data on more than 40,000 JVM’s or Ruby Instances every minute, which does not correlate 1:1 with applications. (Many apps aggregate across multiple JVM’s or Ruby runtimes.) I use the 40,000 number to talk about the scale of the data we collect, rather than the size of our customer base. I don’t have up-to-date numbers on the number of actual apps we collect data on, but I would imagine that it’s over 5,000 since we have nearly 4200 production customers now and some of them have multiple apps (some have dozens in a single account). Anyway, just want to be sure we’re not over-representing ourselves.)”
Thanks Lew! Alan

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